


Toujours Pur

by dear_monday



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2013-10-18
Packaged: 2017-12-29 19:33:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dear_monday/pseuds/dear_monday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come summer, Sirius returns to the house where he was born.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Toujours Pur

Come summer, Sirius returns to the house where he was born. It is a house of unquiet ghosts and dusty old grudges, festering sluggishly in its own history. The room where he sleeps is suffocatingly hot, as if the aged, heavy damask itself would like nothing better than to immolate him where he sleeps.  Lost in the endless, boundless nights when the air is too thick and heavy to breathe, he almost wishes it would. Sometimes, he dreams that his veins are full of tar, thick and acrid, as dark as night. Black blood. Blue blood. In his dreams, he sees himself broken open and scattered across a wine-red sky, studded with chunks of spite and bitterness as bright as stars.

He hates the house. Just breathing the stale air makes him feel unclean, as if the taint of his birthright is trying to reclaim him. He imagines, while he listens to the clock counting out the seconds in the hot, still afternoon, being held down while the family crest is burned into his very flesh. The stifling heat wreaks a strange, soporific enchantment on him, sapping his energy and sinking him into a waking stupor. He hates the inevitability of coming back more and more by the year, drawn irresistibly back like a planet in its orbit around a dying star. He can't think of anything worse than finding himself back where he started, without the strength - or worse, even the desire - to run, run, run, until the poison of this place has burnt itself out of his blood. He wonders if it's like gravity, if he'll stop feeling the pull it has on him if he only runs far enough.

He is visited by relatives he does not like, glimpsing himself reflected in their beautiful, arrogant faces. It reminds him, as it always does, that they are his as surely as he is theirs. He is bound to them, by blood and gold and marriage. Bellatrix, terrible and unhinged and bewitching, wears her blood like battle scars - with pride. Narcissa marries a Malfoy with blood almost as blue as her own, and Andromeda marries a boy with dirt in his veins and under his nails. Shy, sly, sweet Andromeda is not spoken of again. She has turned her back on the family, so the family has turned its back on her. It's a prospect that Sirius finds perversely thrilling. He himself and Regulus are the bright stars in the terrible, seething vastness of the Black family - one, as he is told so often, much brighter than the other. They are each other's perfect opposites, Sirius a boundless black void to his brother's blazing sun. The two of them are the twin princes of an ancient, tarnished kingdom of rot and rust, of poison and pride, of filth and wealth. The golden thread on the family tree is worth just as much as the gold in the bank, if not more. It is tangled around his wrists and ankles, woven through his hair, knotted around his neck. He is the son of an ancient, delinquent aristocracy, and his blood will not let him forget it.

The endless, yawning days pass slowly. He paces the house, clouds of dust blossoming where his feet fall. He counts the number of steps between the rooms, the number of stairs in each flight. The still, heavy heat is like a solid thing against his skin, congealing in his lungs and slopping about in his ears. He imagines his heart tick-tocking in time with every clock in the house, his lifetime diminishing with every measure. Sometimes, in the drowsy, twilit moments when he feels like a sleepwalker, an unwanted guest, he thinks about burning it all to the ground. He thinks about the flames climbing the stairs, devouring the hideous tapestry that binds them all together, engulfing all the trinkets that his mother holds so dear. He thinks about his feet carrying through the ashes instead of the dust-laden, wine-coloured carpet, and about looking up and seeing only the infinite, starry sky above him.

He wonders if that would be enough. Somehow, he doesn't think so. He tries to imagine it - _really_ imagine it, the smouldering ruin and the wailing sirens and the questions and the funerals and... and what? His mind is blank. He tries to construct a world without them, a world where he is truly free at last. He could do anything, reinvent himself a hundred times. But, somehow, when he tries to picture it, nothing sparks or kindles in the murky depths of his mind. It's maddening, to hate his lot so much but to be so scared of the hollow world that would confront him if he did somehow manage to throw it off. It's as if his very existence is conditional upon them; they explain him and define him. He is the work of generations of bitterness and pride and hatred, and every one of his forebears is in his blood, laughing with tainted golden teeth. They have contaminated him, body and mind, and there is no cure. The deathly silence is ruptured by the rasp of his blunt nails on his forearm. Maybe if he scratched away his skin, bled out where he lay - maybe that would do it.

He exhales slowly, watching dust motes caper in the shaft of brightness cast by the streetlamp outside. His eyes burn and his body aches and he's so _tired_ , tired of the bad dreams and the script that was written long before he even drew his first breath, tired of this fucking house. The blood that sustains him is poisoning him slowly, of that he's sure. One day, it will close over him and snuff him out, extinguishing his light, leaving a space in the darkness - this very room, perhaps - for the next cursed child of his mess. Nothing will have changed, but he'll be sleeping under the earth. He won't give a damn.

He closes his eyes, and prays to a god he does not believe in that that day will come soon.


End file.
